


M'aidez, mille fois

by samjohnsson



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:54:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samjohnsson/pseuds/samjohnsson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's no longer just the village healer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	M'aidez, mille fois

Mieux vaut prévenir que guérir.  
2008, Estonia  
She knew better than to be a speaker at any conference, especially one as public as the UN WHO. But she could certainly attend - the “Isabelle Pontand” identity recently discarded and a new one under “Eileen Ménard” freshly inked. While a conference on health systems and the impact of wealth on them might not have been her primary point of interest, she had seen all too often over the years the very points they discussed. A poor village was the same centuries and countries untold, whether the midwife was singing “Amazing Grace” as a brand new hymn in French or a centuries-old gospel in Thai. 

The speaker who presented that one session, though! An epidemiologist from the CDC, she spoke with a clear tone on the importance of developing not only low-cost vaccines, but the importance of optimized delivery systems. The way the speaker - Vanessa Collier or some such - would look at certain points, hesitant and troubled...it was a reminder that medicine couldn’t solely be in the lab and it certainly could not be reactionary.

Eileen was suspicious of the way the speaker would pause and stare at certain people in the audience when she stressed the importance of being caretakers, of being first and foremost healers. She’d been close enough to know the American doctor was no immortal, so it made her capstone lines more impactful. “It was known even in medieval times: preventing the wound when possible supersedes personal inconvenience.” She knew the lady at the lectern had not misspoken or gazed accidentally at her chosen targets.

It was a clarion through her, through the audience. Though to this day, she is unsure why she remembers smelling chocolate.

* * *

Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles.  
2009, Quebec  
Sept-Îles was not the smallest town, nor the most remote, she’d ever worked in. But it made a good staging point to reach First Nations villages throughout Cote-du-Nord and western Labrador. While it wasn’t the most glamourous work, there were parts of it that reminded her of all that came before.

Eileen hadn’t planned on doing field work. But research and being in a lab, even after almost two decades, was too much. After moving on from “Isabelle” and re-establishing her credentials, this field position researching rural and impoverished public health was too tempting, especially after the conference the prior year.

It was disheartening, though. In a country known for its health care system, where too many politicians went forth and waxed balefully on the cost of maintaining such a system, she saw daily the fringes, where people couldn’t come in to receive care. Where they used treatments she had been familiar with 500 years ago. But she was collecting data, good data, and even more, she could trade stories and plant lore with the tribal elders. A century in the Amazon basin taught to her to not discount local pharmacology, a lesson the rest of the world was learning. Maybe, once she could tolerate a lab again, she’d come back to her notes from here and see if the pine stands were as fruitful as the jungle. 

* * *

Un mal et un péril ne vient jamais seul.  
2010, Chile  
By all rights, Eileen should’ve been in Haiti. Chile had a much more modern healthcare system, as well as the infrastructure to rebuild its losses, and she knew all the tongues of Haiti more intimately.

Haiti would have been too risky, though. So close to America, it had drawn the celebrities, well-meaning and otherwise, likes ants to honey. With them it drew cameras. Cameras and video, and all the other forms of media she could not have imagined in her youth. 

But cameras with their physical photos and all the other types of media she’d learned to deceive over the last centuries were things of yesteryear. Now, with everything online, and face-matching software on every social website, it was both more difficult and more important to stay out of media’s blazing eye.

So she came here to Talcahuano, coordinating relief workers and listening to lungs heavy with the dust of hundreds of broken buildings, all in a language familiar but very distant from her own. She organized deliveries of water to mountainside communities, and made phone calls to decades of associates, begging for token sums from research budgets and fortunes amassed over centuries to assist where the cameras weren’t looking. 

It wasn’t the old treatment she learned centuries ago, nor was it the research she’d spent centuries doing, and the mountains and buildings still weren’t safe, but it was medicine.

* * *

A l'œuvre, on connaît l'artisan.  
2011, Germany  
There were days when she remembered fondly the sterility of the lab. Days not unlike this one, where her consulting work in a local clinic turned into a mad dash for bedpans and clean sheets after an outbreak of E. coli. It reminded her of long ago, when medicine consisted of prayer and patience. The new resistance of old diseases to weapons in the modern medical arsenal didn’t harm the comparison, either. Time and again, she looked into the face of one of her patients and remembered an ill farmer from her mortal life, a reminder of why she pursued medicine in the first place. 

It was not pleasant work. It was not glamorous work. It was not her laboratory research, nor her public health work, nor even fundraising for the next round of grants. But it was what she had done for centuries.

* * *

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  
2012, France  
She hadn’t planned on coming to St. Joseph’s. 

There were too many memories, still too fresh. Paul’s grave was nearby, and that young lady of Duncan’s, Tessa. Darius had spent his best days here and even Carlo’s memory couldn’t mar it. Duncan had moved to the States and onward from there. She had lost touch with so many people, so she wouldn’t even see old friends.

But she always came back, just as she always came back to medicine. A conference brought her back this time, with representatives from from the world over. Passing time between panels by visiting the old church was an impulse. She wondered if it was a sign, a return to her old life or a hint of a start of something new. 

When she saw the young woman, no older than twenty and heavily pregnant, slip on the stoop and twist her ankle, though, she pushed it all aside. Gone were the worries about the conference, the memories of the past, the thoughts of the future. For the moment, she was the village’s healer once again. She hurried to render aid, humming an old song under her breath.


End file.
